Earth Day re-incarnated

On the first Earth Day, we skipped school and went to the University of Toledo, where students buried an internal combustion engine. I walked or rode my bike when ever I could, turned lights off, and with the kids at school, started the first environmental awareness club of Perrysburg High School. We named the club:

Clean and
Remove
All
Pollution.

And the acronym is. . . . yep, CRAP.

The truly amazing part of this story is that the school administration let us. There's even a picture of us with our monogrammed trash can in the yearbook. Ah, 1970--the wild days.

Going greener is a bit tricky for us--we're way greener than soooo many people, including sadly many close friends. We recycle the tiniest bits of paper, metal, glass, and plastic, we're replacing light bulbs as they burn out, we're trying to work on 'vampire' appliances, I only use the electric dryer for about 1/3 of the laundry (less than that out west), we have a geothermal heat pump, R-50 or so in the walls and ceiling panels, our water comes in one side of the house and out the other so we're really careful about what goes in the drain and how much we use, we buy a huge portion of our clothes at the Goodwill, we have cloth bags for Christmas and birthday presents, so that leaves pretty much one more area to work on: We need a new car. Dang.

Our Ford E150 van got better mileage than our Chevy Trailblazer. And of course, Ford doesn't make this type any more. We've been trying to find a newer van. Since we pack up and move twice a year, we need space in our vehicles--since we didn't buy my trailer last year. Living 4 miles from the grocery store makes walking to the store tricky, but we make an effort to combine trips. The big waste of gas for us is taking DD into town to watch trains.

We've been working on being green for over 30 years, and we've got a long ways to go. And if you've got a Ford E150 for sale, let me know!